Of course another reason to be annoyed about the way Valkyrie’s arc was cut down to bones in Ragnarok, beyond her getting shorted as a character, is that by all rights she should have been the one to pull the two halves of the story together.
She’s the only living remainder of the old imperial-conquest Asgard. The only person left who understands the world and culture that shaped Hela, the main antagonist. The bridge between what their people were and what Odin tried to make of them for the rest of his life.
That’s relevant to every single major character arc and the overarching narrative themes??? And yet.
We don’t even get to learn whether her profession of slave-taking would have been considered shameful by her native culture, or if only the excessive drinking and having to placate the Grandmaster would be. She certainly acts like it’s the latter, and it’s logical to assume so, but that’s a fairly major issue to leave totally unresolved.
Valkyrie winds up being put in charge of the remnant of the Asgardian people and we still never got a single word of insight from her about the cultural differences between her and the people she now rules.
Obviously it’s less relevant when everyone’s learning to be refugees together anyway and then half of even those are dead, and then half again, but still. It’s really emblematic of how shafted female characters always get in the MCU that even where developing her would have made the story make more sense it wasn’t allowed.
The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruce’s compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...
...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....
(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadn’t just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldn’t kill anyone...)
While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.
It’s supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. He’s not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.
But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Ren’s face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.
Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.
And selfishness isn’t itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.
That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.
And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.
But the Accords didn’t address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.
The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Banner’s help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.
Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isn’t actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science man’s mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because he’s self-funded, at the very least let’s invent a mechanism to make up for that.
That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tony’s personal guilt feelings.
But no one suggests that! It’s not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, that’s been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.
And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another ‘Wanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim pool’ incident.
They didn’t care! They blatantly didn’t care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!
(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.
Actually you’re well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.
The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)
The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. That’s. The plot of the film.
Then Zemo staged T’Chaka’s assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.
Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.
And there’s honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You don’t have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.
And Tony fucking knew they weren’t. He didn’t even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that he’d been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.
That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesn’t unwrite that.
And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasn’t the reason Steve said no, while...
Tony wasn’t acting out of principle. Tony isn’t...very good at having principles. That’s not even a criticism or condemnation, it’s just how he functions. Since Iron Man he’s been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like ‘ride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.’ It works less well for nuanced situations.
Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads who’d figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.
And you can tell he wasn’t acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...
...well, firstly wouldn’t have chosen to stage a massive battle? But it’s possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since it’s a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.
But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardian’s knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tony’s approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didn’t need that. What the fuck frankly.
That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other people’s hands because he’s realized he can’t trust his own.
And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldn’t necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.
And that’s the other thing! Everything about ‘Tony + Accords BFFs’ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time he’s fighting to force this surrender of agency down other people’s throats that he is going to be practically immune.
This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had ‘privatized world peace.’
(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)
He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as ‘mass murder’ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.
No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.
And like. I’m willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of ‘superheroing’ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!
But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.
The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didn’t finally retire for real this time. You don’t force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.
Thank you so, so, so much for that Tony Stark post. Because, yes, exactly you hit the nail on the head: he is not personally controllable with legislation and he is definitely suffering from guilt and self recrimination but that DOES NOT MEAN you get to hurt others. He is painful to watch. I've never seen anyone articulate it so well, thank you. I ended up writing an essay in my notes just agreeing with you a lot because he cannot use his pain as an excuse for the scale of damage he does.
Where is the essay nonny??? I cannot find it. Show meeeeee.
💖 Thank you for the positivity! Ngl it’s always scary criticizing a popular character, you never know what’s going to happen.
I’ve tried a lot of times to respond to this ask without going on another tirade, but they keep building up, especially whenever I see someone tearing Steve down to build Tony up, and I go from zero to a full head of steam so fast.
I’ve avoided engaging about it, but it fucks me up so bad every time, it’s crazy.
Because I didn’t think I was all that attached to Cap, I don’t even really consider myself a fan, but he. Right up until that unintentionally appalling ending they derailed his character into, he worked so hard to be good.
He doesn’t want to kill anyone, but he doesn’t like bullies.
He spent his entire life under conditions of extreme suffering, and unlike Tony he refused to let it warp him into something vicious and selfish that lashed out at others to comfort himself--or rather, he bound himself with adamantine chains to make sure that when he used violence, even as a coping mechanism, it was only ever against people more powerful than him, individually or in aggregate, who were doing something harmful he could interfere against, and who had the freedom to walk away.
Tony never bothered with any of that. He doesn’t have to. No one expects anything of him, in his life or ours; our standards are in the basement and we’re super willing to identify with him, so even the manifestation of the awareness that he did something wrong is cheered like heroism. He expects ‘points’ for remembering there was a connection between Pepper and strawberries, even if she’s allergic and he thought they were her favorite, and he gets them.
All he has to do is turn away from being his worst self, no matter how many times he completes that rotation a full 360 degrees, and we’ll cheer for him.
Which is a great character design strategy! Honestly! Except they walked it into the ground.
Tony was introduced as someone learning to be better, but then he wound up getting worse and worse and worse. His redemption arc derailed really early, because Marvel Studios were lazy or afraid or didn’t trust their audience, idk.
He sacrificed so many people to his own gaping emotional wound, that hungry maw of egotism turned Byronic and recharacterized as heroism, as goodness or at least its sketch.
Jumping on the grenade is so much easier than reining yourself in every minute, not abusing your power, respecting the lives and needs of others and treating them as real.
Nothing Tony ever achieved moved the dial away from his narcissism, and very little of it did anything about the toxicity of how he inhabited that narcissism. And a heroic death would be nothing in the face of his personal crimes even if it had been one that was a little more rationally necessary, and not one that took several hours of movie and the contrived failure of every other person in the setting to even be possible or relevant.
(And even if you’re willing to hang onto suspension of disbelief and pretend that dropping 3.5 billion refugees into a world that just barely patched itself together in the face of 50% mortality somehow isn’t going to result in a staggering death toll.)
Unlike Vader, Tony Stark died as he lived, and so the death means much, much less.
With great power comes great responsibility, and with his billions Tony was always the most powerful Avenger, because Thor never took his throne when it was still tall and golden and untouchable. And he spat on that principle every day of his life.
And when people act like his ‘suffering’ somehow justifies that, it’s like every single piece of the warped rich-white-confident-male-centric empathy gap of our culture leaping into life and strangling all ethical rationality and justice. I just.
I know it’s just superheroes. I know it’s not serious. Except superheroes and cinema are mainstays of our shared cultural sense of right and wrong. The Violence Against Women Act exists purely because of the shift in public perception created by one movie about one real woman.
So when a massive superhero film franchise has a moral narrative that I find repulsive, and I see that reasoning echoed out in the world, it feels important.
I am attached to Steve, small angry starving Steve looking Death in the face every day he drew breath and refusing to blink, but I think what’s making me so damn mad when I see this insistence on tearing him down to prop up a mass murderer is the proof that even Captain America, who is white and male and tall and beautiful and romantically interested in women, who ticks all these boxes that help when it comes to Mattering, still doesn’t have enough Real Person Points to stand up against the absolute certainty in a billionaire’s heart that he is the only real person in the universe, that his self-pity is the truest sorrow that ever was.
Not in Tony’s eyes, and not when it comes to our willingness as a society to inexplicably believe him.
You know the whole Europe-facing Opium Wars side of all the shit that went down in China in that era looks like such an incomprehensible Bond villain plot from this distance:
‘oh, we shall control the opiate supply and force their government at gunpoint to allow us to bring in huge amounts of it and sell it to their citizens, thus both extracting wealth from the nation and compromising their power further by undermining their social order with rampant uncontrollable addiction! mwahahahaha!’
But you stop wondering how they came up with that really fast when you realize it’s just a minor adaptation of a control strategy the British Empire had been relying on in every single place they colonized since Ireland, and applying to the bottom ranks of their own people into the bargain since.
Just...swapping in a different intoxicant to suit the specific context.
The profit of selling the stuff was only the first-order reason they wanted the rum production capacity of Jamaica so badly.
Joker was also able to steal Bruce's money because he commits literally billions of dollars worth of tax fraud to hide that he spends such huge amounts of money on Batman and Batman-related programs which...we're supposed to sympathize with Bruce here, apparently?
That’s really offensive, I am really offended with the fact that they’re really going with that, how are they missing the point of Batman this utterly, it’s like they really wish no one liked him and they could stop making comics???
But also that explains nothing whatsoever. Bruce doing crimes doesn’t make his property free for the grabbing? People can’t just...seize one another’s assets?
And the kind of assets in question, you can’t just...steal them. It doesn’t work. They only exist as social and legal fictions.
If the Joker bought them with phony money the sale is invalid. If he bought them with stolen money, they may be subject to seizure. If he forged Bruce’s signature transferring the assets, then that’s not a valid transfer of assets and all you have to do is prove it was a forgery. If he coerced Bruce into transferring his assets, well that’s a little more realistic except it’s Batman and the Joker and anyway that would be a different story.
In none of those cases is Bruce’s having been caught being shitty at accounting and having a stupid rich person definition of ‘crime’ relevant to how the Joker got the stuff.
So...how does Bruce’s financial malfeasance create an in for the Joker? Have they even tried to explain.
Im sorry, you had a character who had been raised in a place that hated magic users, been framed and lost faith in the government, became a fugitive whose ONLY FRIEND was a magic user..... And the dm did not lap that up on a plate???? You basically handed them a plot on a platter omg
On the one hand yes, and I was trying so hard, I was single-handedly carrying the ‘giving a shit about the story premise’ flag. She told me all about the setting (but not the plot) and what the party needed for balance ahead of time, and I built my girl to interface with all of that and then it...just didn’t work out at all.
On the other, she was trying hard too. She really didn’t know what she was doing, had never played under a competent DM who cared about story, and had gone into this with a ludicrously ambitious complex political machination plotline that collapsed the second we won our first encounter, and did not get kidnapped and coerced into working for the secret police as surprise agents the other factions didn’t know about.
And fell apart harder when she let the oracle be old friends with the head of the army, and suddenly we had ties to power in the opposite faction from the one she wanted us forced to serve, and even harder when (forced to make things up to replace the original plan) she had the place we went to hide besieged by an army of secret police trying to assassinate Army Boss Lady, her only developed PC who wasn’t a Super Annoying Dude, permanently exploding the ‘sneaky subtle machinations’ vibe.
But she just couldn’t let it go. She really wanted us to experience emotional conflict about what had shaped up into a really straightforward decision that I was the only member of the party who was emotionally invested in anyway.
Even when I tried to help I sometimes put extra strain on her, because I would get really into the worldbuilding and then for example be totally bewildered that the houses had roofs you could stand on, when we were four levels down in a city dug deep into a cliff face.
It had never occurred to her to look for plot in PC interactions, I think, and if it had I can see not attempting to lean into it, when dealing with a party composed mostly of asshole divas and characters specifically designed around not giving a shit. (We started out with two wizards who were different flavors of indifferent to the persecution except re: not getting caught.)
The sorceress princess didn’t care about anything currently in the story only her distant lost throne, and kept starting drama for lulz and ego, and the oracle just steadily escalated her attempts to get the desired power trip out of the game at the expense of everything else. Apparently she was DMing the DM violent revenge fantasies about an NPC who took her character down in an ambush that we’d been kind of manipulated into with misleading descriptions of the amount of cover available. Scary shit.
DM was overwhelmed. It happens. Although the more I describe the situations we got into the more I’m like ‘wow she really had problems with wanting us to wind up in specific positions so NPC dudes could monologue plot at us, huh.’
My roleplaying was specifically designed to interface with her stated plot, but it didn’t always yield the outcomes she wanted or relate directly to her opening story goals, so she often reacted to it as a distraction, which didn’t help.
That’s a learning curve thing, but I’m still annoyed with her for getting mad that my character wholeheartedly disliked her carefully crafted Morally Ambiguous Antagonist, who was super condescending and ran the secret police, and turned out to have been maintaining a constitutional crisis for fifty years so he could be the de facto ruler of the city-state and keep us locked in a state of infighting and witch-hunting so we didn’t have the energy to devote to serious border wars, as opposed to the low-key, defensive border wars I’d fought and my adored older sister had died in.
His sole good trait was being anti-war and my character was a very young, patriotic, dedicated member of the military elite! Why would she be conflicted? Because he’s an authority figure? Maybe then don’t give me alternate authorities who have better morals and more right to boss me and are telling me to do things that make sense for reasons they actually explain!
And she caught him in a lie in the very first thing he ever said to her, even before she knew who he was. Pulling off subsequent Bluff checks doesn’t obligate a PC to trust the NPC who they know lied to them for no apparent reason about something very basic, when they have every reason in the world to be paranoid?
But I got accused of godmoding. 😩 Because Dimsil didn’t trust this suspicious man to send us to go fight sewer zombies, after a week in a bunker hiding from her own government when she was supposed to be on sabbatical going home to meet her new nephew.
I was prepared to be the odd one out for being Lawful, but not fitting into the party because I was the only one who cared on an in-character level and I cared too much was hard.
...I’m always going to be salty about all the attempted railroading with that one NPC tbh. The dude had actually set up our framing on purpose, but he didn’t tell us this, so my girl was just really scornful that he thought he was the only one who could possibly be trusted to run the city when apparently he couldn’t even run his Inquisitors effectively enough to not have them running off trying to frame random citizens to meet quota. That’s not a sign of good management!
But yeah, tiefling wizard rogue dude with his thing for bombs and my paladin starting to be real friends in the middle of the bullshit storm could have developed into something really cool, I think, if the campaign hadn’t collapsed under the weight of entitlement and drama. As they do.
And in addition to the difficult party members, flexibility and being invested in the story on a character level rather than a major-themes or detailed-moment level are useful DM skills, which is something I knew but until this ask hadn’t isolated as a concept in quite this way. Thank you!
So actually my Harley Quinn: Bop! take is that--okay first, that’s the only way to write the title, it gives a much more accurate impression of the film.
Now, fully acknowledging that it’s both better made and better conceived than most of the rest of the DCEU, and the fight scenes justify its existence all on their own, and some of the stuff in it was really fun, and that it managed to end really strong which is Not Easy.
And putting aside my preconceptions as a comics fan, which I managed to do more than I honestly expected thanks to lots of warning...I still had some major difficulties with it.
Item one: It bought into the chestnut that in order to show a woman triumphing over people who want to use her, control her, and make her small, you must first show them succeeding. And her letting them--so that later she can realize she doesn’t have to. This is both unfun and insulting. Can we please move on.
Item two: The style of humor where any time a character is confident or triumphant or comfortable or proud they are guaranteed a funny takedown to keep them from getting above themselves is a really bad match with a girl power movie??? Especially when combined with the above plot approach. It’s a bad combo.
Item three: I understand the villain had to be both reprehensible enough we were delighted to see him blown up and lame enough he wouldn’t attract a fan base as the ‘true star of the picture,’ but having produced such a contemptible being why did they have to let him talk so much?
That was so much screen time he absolutely did not need. Leaving me bored af and grossed out for several minutes at a time, repeatedly, did harm to both the pace of the film overall and my ability to remain immersed in its premise.
what is with online reading apps like wattpad and scribd telling me how much book is left in units of time? it feels uncomfortably controlling. why do they presume. they’re always wrong. where are they getting their data.
sometimes it makes me feel uncomfortably like i’ve got a maximum limit and am not allowed to stop reading and do something else, which is very unpleasant.
at least libby displays the stats only when asked, while the book is closed, and it includes how many times you’ve opened it and how long in total you’ve spent with it open, before calculating how much time you need to finish.
which can work out to a very funny number if you’ve read leisurely through something very long and skipped back to the beginning to check out the title page or something, and the app is like ‘you’ve had the book open [x] amount of time and have all the pages left! you’re on track to finish in 18.4 weeks!’
